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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Optic2Connect will be present at this year’s DAC. I caught up with Sean Seah, project manager, to find out more.

First,
what’s the company’s X factor and why? (What is it that makes your
offering special and noteworthy – how are you different from
competitors)?

Optic2Connect develops software solutions for the
photonics industry. The demand to manage high volumes of data in
networks, especially with the current smart-phone and cloud computing
trend, has increased tremendously. As design gets more complex,
simulation tools need to scale with regard to fidelity and accuracy.

Currently,
photonic designers, scientists, and fabrication engineers adopt an
approximated approach from the electrical data to build an equivalent
optical model, hence losing on device physics details. At the same time
the process is long as the model needs to be described block-by-block
with denser blocks representing a more detailed model. Our competitors
are well established in their respective domains, electrical or optical,
but they are strong in their own respective fields. However, intimate
knowledge in both are essential to fully understand this newer
generation of photonic devices. Failure to understand fully results in
false results from the manufacturing.

With patented know-how,
Optic2Connect provides software solutions that SOLVES this pertinent
challenge. It maps accurately simulations from one domain to another,
e.g. electrical to optical. This technology has been developed by a team
of researchers at A*Star – Singapore Public Research Institute. The
technology overcomes error-prone and detailed oriented simulation
setups. We demonstrated the ability to map without losing any fidelity
in the simulation files.

Optic2Connect’s IP differs from its
competitors because it simulates directly from the beginning device
processing, to electrical device performance until the final high-speed
optical eye diagram. This is in stark contrast to the usual method of
representing their operation using simplified transfer functions.

Furthermore,
the Optic2Connect design flow uses the same reliable tools and
processes from the semiconductor industry that are fully compatible with
the Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication process
of silicon microelectronics. This design flow uses standard tools
libraries, device models especially for active components such as
modulators, and simulation of these components incorporating the models.

How
have you been doing this year so far? Seah said: “It has been
excellent! We are racing to complete our product prototypes and we
secured a contract from an MNC and another from universities.”

What’s
the future path likely to be? Seah added: “We intend to further
validate our prototype with our partners from industry and academia, and
integrating advanced modulation formats into our solutions. We want to
offer a fully integrated solution for photonic devices to our customers.
Our goal is to offer a one-stop solution for leading integrated-circuit
(IC) manufacturers!”

Why this name? You sounded like a telecom
company? Seah said: “We strongly believe the future of communications is
via optics which has the ability to circumvent the data bottleneck
issues. Optic2Connect is meant to offer connect using optical
communications. Our goal is a one-stop solution for optical connections.
“

How will the solution significantly shorten product time-to-market and reduce development costs of photonics devices?

For
complex photonics devices, minute changes to design parameters are
significant and could affect loss performance, and operating voltage
requirements. One common approach in the industry today is to physically
build the variations into multiple device / runs and test them out.
Each run cost is the range of hundreds of thousands and consume precious
time. Especially, if the first batch of devices do not meet required
parameters and additional batches are required. This cost both money and
time, which in turn is more money.

Hence, Optic2Connect provides
an elegant solution with our accurate modelling and simulation
solutions, this accelerates manufacturing prototypes and at much lower
production costs. Our software solutions provide a 10x improvement in
time reduction and time to market. Further, our cloud solution overcomes
traditional problems of insufficient servers / licenses, especially
during periods of peak demand.